Book Review: Schrödinger’s Caterpillar by Zane Stumpo

I came across this book ages ago when I first started hanging out on a site for authors. Well, actually, to be more precise…I came across this trailer. I’d embed it, but since it’s slightly ‘rude’ as the author puts it, I’ll let you choose if you want to go out and check it out. For me…it really sold me on the book.

Of course, at that time, the book wasn’t yet released, and only available to read on the site, which was rather annoying to use…so it fell by the wayside.

Until I randomly remembered its existence.

And I’m quite happy I did.

Schrödinger’s Caterpillar starts out feeling a lot like a bad Douglas Adams rip-off. I’ll admit that in the early pages, I quickly found this to be an unhappy thought, that this author was really just trying to take Adams’ style of going off on random tangents about subjects that may or may not matter at all to the actual story.

But as I read on, I realized I couldn’t be farther from the truth.

Stumpo’s style here is incredible. Mixing fact with fiction, melding the two to a point where one might get confused about which parts of the science-y bits are actually based on truth and which parts aren’t.

But…none of that is all that important anyways, because the true beauty here is the actual tale of Graham Paint, a seemingly witless man who finds himself basically capable of choosing which life, out of his possible lives he could have made it to, he’d prefer to end up in. Or…just try one on for a while. Or just, you know, screw around with the lives of his alternative selves.

But…even that’s not important, because all of this comes down to just one incredibly zany adventure where you really don’t know what’s going to happen next because the narrator himself can just pick and choose which universe he might decide things reside in next.

There are many times throughout the course of the book where it seems like it’s about to go down some rather predictable sci-fi roads…only to have the entire thing turned on its head and totally new aspects of the story come to light.

Needless to say, I greatly enjoyed this read, and although I’m not sure the story leaves much room for a sequel, I’ll be quite interested to see what Stumpo does with it.